In all the ruckus around Nati's post, there was one thing that didn't get a lot of attention. If you look at that randomly selected list of 9 web sites from Pingdom, not a single one of them uses an Oracle database. (and I believe that neither do most of the big web players -- Google, Amazon, eBay, etc.). They overwhelmingly use MySQL and in many case use some other tier - such as their own file system or an in-memory cache, as the system of record for session or transaction state.
In my post It's the Architecture, Stupid! I gave my take on why the Tangosol acquisition by Oracle is not really going to change anything because they are so committed to the database-centric status quo, and they really will use the Tangosol stuff as little patch to fix what they think are minor bottlenecks.
The other day, I was reading Nick Carr's excellent post The week that Big Software shattered - his analysis of Oracle Vs. SAP Vs. Salesforce.com, and here's what the master had to say:
Oracle, which has never been particularly sentimental or ideological about software, stands for the status quo. It believes that big companies will continue to buy and expand old-style client-server-age systems for a good long while, and it plans to be the preferred supplier to the market. Through acquisitions and share gains, it will milk the old model until the old model goes dry.
Ouch.
Not exactly Web 2.0-friendly.
Nati has a nice take on this in Putting the Database Where it Belongs.
